There aren’t too many CEOs who’ve faced the challenges Overwatch founder Josh Moody has.
Like all entrepreneurs, Moody has completed exhaustive market research, courted investors and shepherded the sometimes-painful birthing process that gets an idea off the drawing board and into the marketplace.
But unlike other business visionaries, Moody also has to make sure his shirt’s tucked, business calls are postponed until after 3 p.m. and his haircut passes daily muster to avoid the same detention afforded any other student at Little Rock’s Catholic High School.
“It was an incredibly tough first week of school,” Moody said. “I’d have a few minutes of down time in study hall, and I’d think of all the things that I could be doing with the company that I’d have to put off until after school. I’m getting used to it more.”
So goes the slightly surreal world of the simultaneous chief executive and high school senior, where playing video games with buddies doubles as product beta testing and marketing plans compete with weekend plans that could include a trip to the very store where one day soon, his peers will buy his company’s product.
“Weekends aren’t as free as they used to be,” said Moody, 17.
A couple years ago, Moody and his friends tired of video gaming and started going outside to play with airsoft guns (participants shoot plastic pellets at each other with replica firearms). The self-described “tinkerer” imagined how airsoft and other live-action activities like paintball would be enhanced if, as in video gaming, team members could communicate and track opponents’ movements.
Thus were the seeds for the Overwatch mobile app sown.
“I knew what I needed and what had to happen, but I didn’t have the programming skills or the funding to make it happen,” Moody said. “I knew the product inside and out, but I had never run a business before, never pitched an idea before or really, had any level of experience. But, I had the passion to learn and understand it.”
Enter Michael Paladino, co-founder of RevUnit, a Bentonville-based digital developer. He first heard about Overwatch from Josh’s father David, a consultant in the digital field.
“David said, ‘You should meet my son, he’s got this great idea for an app,’ which is something we hear about 100 times a week,” said Paladino, 34. “But we agreed to go meet this 16-year-old kid and after five minutes you could tell there was this maturity and intelligence about him.”
Over the next three hours around the Moodys’ dining room table, Josh impressed Paladino and RevUnit CEO Joe Saumweber with his grasp of the product’s potential. More personal to Paladino were the earmarks Moody carried of Catholic High.
“Josh and I immediately had a rapport,” said Paladino, a 1997 CHS grad. “A lot of his educational stuff wasn’t going to carry through on this venture, but I also knew a lot of what he was being taught had to do with his character. I knew who he was because I had been there.”
RevUnit signed on as major equity partner, building the app and providing guidance to the young CEO. They also applied for the ARK Challenge, a three-month, federally funded boot camp in Fayetteville that provides entrepreneurs $20,000 in seed money and access to product development and mentors.
Of the 92 companies from 15 states and 15 countries applying this year, only nine got in, Overwatch among them. Because Moody had to temporarily relocate to northwest Arkansas, CHS principal Steve Straessle agreed to let Moody work a flex schedule for the first three weeks of the semester.
“I talked to Mr. Straessle before we even applied to ARK and told him this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said. “He encouraged me to do it, as long as I worked it out with my teachers and turned work in on time. At Catholic, you don’t put academics on the back burner.”
Moody, a member of Immaculate Conception Church in North Little Rock, was the youngest entrepreneur at ARK. At its conclusion Sept. 5, participants pitched their companies for an additional $150,000 in funding; Overwatch was one of three to land the extra capital and the only Arkansas company to boot.
Moody expects the mobile app to be available for download in late 2013 and airsoft gun manufacturer Cybergun signed a marketing deal to bundle Overwatch gear with its guns in major retailers early next year. And, for now, “we’re preparing as if I am going to college,” Moody said, adding modestly he hopes being a CEO will stand out to admissions officers.
